‘We do not Think that a Teacher's Duty is to Produce a Mere Human Machine' Teachers and Teaching

According to R.H. Tawney, the ‘elementary schools of 1870 were intended in the main to produce an orderly, civil, obedient population, with sufficient education to understand a command.’ ¹ Tawney’s assessment has been shared by numerous others, and a considerable body of scholarship examining modern educational systems has focused, in the words of Michael Apple, on the ‘role of the school in reproducing the social division of labor and … how it is that people accept such sorting and selecting.’ ² These social control approaches have been influential since the 1970s, inspiring much fine work on educational tracking, connections between the economic system and school practices, and the ways schools defuse potentially rebellious social tendencies. ³ But the uncritical adoption of such a perspective presents schooling as static and monolithic, whereas this chapter will continue to analyze schools as contested spaces.